Cleopatra, The queen of Egypt
Cleopatra believed herself to be a living goddess, and she often used clever stagecraft to woo potential allies and reinforce her divine status.
While Cleopatra was born in Egypt, she traced her family origins to Macedonian Greece and Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander the Great’s generals.
Ptolemy took the reigns of Egypt after Alexander’s death in 323 BC, and he launched a dynasty of Greek-speaking rulers that lasted for nearly three centuries.
Despite not being ethnically Egyptian, Cleopatra embraced many of her country’s ancient customs and was the first member of the Ptolemaic line to learn the Egyptian language.
Members of the Ptolemaic Dynasty often married within the family to preserve the purity of their bloodline. Cleopatra married both of her adolescent brothers, each of whom served as her ceremonial spouse and co-regent at different times during her reign. She was much elder to both of them.
Roman propaganda painted Cleopatra as a temptress who used her beauty as a political weapon, but she may have been more renowned for her intellect than her appearance.
Cleopatra joined Julius Caesar in Rome beginning in 46 BC, but was forced to flee Rome after Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman senate in 44 BC.
Cleopatra eventually married Mark Antony. Antony’s rival Octavian and the Roman Senate declared war on Cleopatra in 32 BC. In the battle at Actium, Cleopatra led dozens of Egyptian warships into the fray alongside Antony’s fleet, but they were forced to flee to Egypt.
Cleopatra and Antony famously took their own lives in 30 BC, after Octavian’s forces pursued them to Alexandria. While Antony is said to have fatally stabbed himself, legend has it that Cleopatra died by enticing an “asp”— Egyptian cobra — to bite her arm, but the ancient chronicler Plutarch admits that “what really took place is known to no one.”
She spoke as many as a dozen languages and was educated in mathematics, philosophy, oratory, and astronomy, and Egyptian sources later described her as a ruler “who elevated the ranks of scholars”.
Cleopatra believed herself to be a living goddess, and she often used clever stagecraft to woo potential allies and reinforce her divine status.
There’s also evidence that Cleopatra wasn’t as physically striking as once believed. Coins with her portrait show her with manly features and a large, hooked nose, though some historians contend that she intentionally portrayed herself as masculine as a display of strength.
She had a hand in the deaths of three of her siblings. Cleopatra’s first sibling-husband, Ptolemy XIII drowned in the Nile River after being defeated by Julius Caesar. She remarried her younger brother Ptolemy XIV but murdered him in a bid to make her son her co-ruler. In 41 BC, she also engineered the execution of her sister, Arsinoe.
